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Obama Administration Races to Regulate Before Leaving Office

Just because President Obama’s legacy was defeated at the ballot box doesn’t mean that the regulator-in-chief is going to change. In the final weeks of his lame duck presidency, the Obama administration is hustling to complete as many new regulations as possible. This adds on to what is already the all-time record year for regulation based on page count. This continued regulatory aggression against the American people underlines why under this president the regulatory state has grown by an unprecedented amount.

The Obama administration is currently reviewing 98 regulations which could be completed by the end of his term, seventeen of those with an economic impact of more than $100 million! A study by the American Action Forum estimates that Obama’s last-minute, “midnight” regulations could cost the American people $44.1 billion.

With these last-minute regulations, the Obama administration is taking a calculated gamble. Once President Trump takes office, Republicans in Congress will have an opportunity to use the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to overrule any regulations passed during the last 60 legislative days of the current Congress. However, each CRA resolution to repeal a regulation has to be passed individually. This consumes precious legislative time in Congress.

As reported by the Washington Post, the administration’s strategy is to get as many regulations through as possible, leaving Congress with no choice but to pick and choose what it can get to, with the rest left in place. Anything not addressed by a CRA resolution must go through a much longer and more complicated regulatory process to be withdrawn or modified.

This transparent attempt to entrench regulatory overreach should come as no surprise from this administration, which has expanded the regulatory state at every opportunity. Add these last minute rules to an already-long list of regulatory adventurism that the next president will have to clean-up.

What are some of the regulations that have come out or could come out in the lame duck period of the Obama administration? Here’s are just a few:

A little more than a month ago, the White House and tax-writers in the House and Senate rolled out the Unified Framework for Fixing Our Broken Tax Code. The goal of the framework was to provide a sign to both members of Congress and the American people on the direction that the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee would take when they began work on this crucial effort.

FreedomWorks Foundation's Regulatory Action Center submitted comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week supporting the agency's stay and review of unnecessary and burdensome methane emission regulations on the domestic oil and gas industry. FreedomWorks Foundation further calls upon EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to investigate the process by which such laughably bad regulations were finalized and fire those responsible.

Over 250 years ago, courageous colonists took up arms and defended the right against unlawful search and seizure in the American Revolution. Fueled by outrageous searches by British law enforcement, our founding fathers enshrined within our constitution the Fourth Amendment, which reads, in part: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

FreedomWorks Foundation submitted, thus far, the only comment to an open Coast Guard docket requesting information on regulations to review and/or reverse, in accordance with President Trump's executive orders on regulatory reform.

Recently, the economic disparity of the urban-rural divide has garnered substantial attention, especially as it relates to Internet and technological expansion. Rural economies suffer from a lack of Internet connectivity relative to urban areas, with rural adults being 10 percent less likely to have broadband or smartphones than urban adults.

From a so-called “economic miracle” to a human rights disaster, Venezuela has followed in the footsteps of literally every single socialist or communist country ever with its country in complete collapse. Crime is on the rise, the people are starving, protests are going all throughout the country, and unconfirmed rumors are coming out that President Nicolas Maduro is considering leaving.

An issue that has a tendency to come into the public consciousness from time to time is bringing back Glass-Steagall. Initially repealed in 1999 by the Financial Services Modernization Act, primarily known as the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, the law that separated commercial and investment banking has received renewed support with both party platforms during last year’s presidential election calling for it to be reinstated.

Over the past several months, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a step back on federal justice reform efforts, regressing to purportedly “tough on crime” stances. From advising increased penalties for nonviolent offenders to more recently promising an increase in the use of civil asset forfeiture by the federal government, Sessions has been doing everything in his power to give the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s full support to 80s-era policies from which many conservatives have abandoned in favor of evidenced-based practices that reduce recidivism and enhance public safety.

Over the past several years, there has been a move to make college campuses an ideological bubble where only preferred and pre-approved perspectives are allowed, known as “safe spaces.” It seems this line of thinking is not only on college campuses as some of our politicians have been calling for that as well. Most recently, Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Janet Yellen openly suggested turning the Federal Reserve into a safe space.

Yesterday, FreedomWorks Foundation submitted comments in support of the FCC's proposed Restoring Internet Freedom Rule. This rule, proposed under Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, would reverse FCC's 2015 classification and regulation of Internet service providers (ISPs) as public utilities or common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, more commonly referenced as "net neutrality" rules. This would return ISPs to a light-touch regulatory framework that allowed for the Internet to grow and flourish into the revolutionary economic engine we know today.